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Dell R720xd Storage Questions

that1itguy
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I just bought a R720xd server that has 2.5 24x bay hard drive slots. I'm wanting to fill the drive caddies with a bunch of SSD's but I don't want to pay Dell the hefty price for their hard drives. I'm wondering if anyone else is running a home-lab that is running with full SSDs? I was hoping that I could pick up quite a few Samsung, WD or other SSDs that wouldn't cost so much as Dell's hard drives. I did read some places that they might not be supported by the Perc controller? Mine has the H710 controller installed. I plan to load VMware on it and run a bunch of virtual machines but didn't want to buy a lot of SSD drives only to find out they won't work. Thoughts?

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Consumer sata ssds work fine in dell servers. 

 

How much space do you need? 

 

The controller works fine with ssds, but it might not support things like trim.

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@Electronics Wizardy Initially wanting around 10TB of storage to move all my files from my NAS to the server and then eventually expand as space is needed. If I plan on running ESXi, is it easy to add space to the datastore going forward when needed or best to do it initially? 

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1 hour ago, that1itguy said:

@Electronics Wizardy Initially wanting around 10TB of storage to move all my files from my NAS to the server and then eventually expand as space is needed. If I plan on running ESXi, is it easy to add space to the datastore going forward when needed or best to do it initially? 

ESXi doesn't do raid, so your raid card would need to do that. Most raid cards allow expanding of arrays

 

Do you want 10tb of ssds?

 

You probably want a raid 10 for vm storage.

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@Electronics Wizardy I was planning on adding 10x 1TB SSD drives in the server and expanding as needed. Probably throw a 500GB SSD (?) as the boot drive. If I run those data drives in RAID 10, would I get the full allotted storage space of 10TB or it would be less because it's RAID?

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8 minutes ago, that1itguy said:

@Electronics Wizardy I was planning on adding 10x 1TB SSD drives in the server and expanding as needed. Probably throw a 500GB SSD (?) as the boot drive. If I run those data drives in RAID 10, would I get the full allotted storage space of 10TB or it would be less because it's RAID?

With raid 10 you get half the space(so 5tb).

 

I think you can add drives a pair at a time.

 

With esxi id just boot from a usb drive.

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@Electronics Wizardy Do you think its necessary to do RAID with using SSDs since their failure rate is a lot lower than traditional hard drives? 

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1 hour ago, that1itguy said:

@Electronics Wizardy Do you think its necessary to do RAID with using SSDs since their failure rate is a lot lower than traditional hard drives? 

Depends on the risik you want. If its for a home lab, raid 0 is probbly fine, assuming you hve good bckups.

 

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